US facing home-grown Islamic terror threat

The United States is facing what has been described as its "most serious
instance of domestic terrorism" to date, the FBI has warned.

Militants in Somali: FBI fears immigrants lving in the USA will turn to terrorismPhoto: AP

By Alex Spillius in Washington

6:35PM GMT 13 Mar 2009

Officials say a second generation of Somali immigrants is becoming increasingly radicalised and could pose a growing threat to security.

The warnings come amid the revelation that 20 young Somali American men who returned to their war-torn homeland have been radicalised by a group linked to al-Qaeda.

The FBI is urgently examining links between the youths, who are all American citizens, and al-Shabaab, an Islamist group fighting in the country's long-running conflict.

Investigators are concentrating on two mosques, the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Centre in Minneapolis and the Dawah Institute in the neighbouring city of St Paul, where parents and guardians of the departed youths said their sons attended classes.

But the probe has now spread to Boston, San Diego, Seattle, Columbus, Ohio and Portland, Maine.

Related Articles

US law enforcement agencies are concerned young militants could return to the US to plot terror attacks, following a similar path to the British Pakistanis behind the London bombings in July 7, 2005 who made multiple visits to radical mosques in Pakistan.

The authorities began looking into the radicalisation of Somali youths after 27-year-old Shirwa Ahmed became the first known American suicide bomber in late October.

The Minneapolis student blew himself up in one of five co-ordinated bombings in northern Somalia orchestrated by al-Shabaab, whose former leader reportedly trained at terror camps in Afghanistan before being killed in an American air strike in May, 2008.

The FBI suspects the men were radicalised by classes at the Minneapolis and St Paul mosques, and has issued grand jury subpoenas as it attempts to find out who their teachers were, what they were taught and who funded and facilitated their travel.

The Abubakar centre has denied any political activity and has condemned "all acts of indiscriminate violence".

Omar Jamal, director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Centre in Minneapolis, whose members informed the FBI when the first youth vanished a year ago, acknowledged that al-Shabaab had supporters and donors among America's 200,000-strong Somali community.

He said Somali youth were vulnerable to recruitment because of poor job prospects, disillusionment with US foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a call to arms against a US-backed Ethiopian incursions into Somalia.

Andrew Liepman, a deputy director at the National Counter Terrorism Centre, said: "We are concerned that if a few Somali American youth could be motivated to engage in such activities overseas, fellow travellers could return to the US and engage in terrorist activities here."

The day before President Barack Obama's inauguration, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin to law enforcement agencies warning that al-Shabaab or its sympathisers might be planning an attack in Washington.

The warning came to nothing, but Senator Joe Lieberman, a high-ranking member of the senate homeland security committee, has stressed the urgency of the threat. "Bottom line is that there is a problem here [which] also threatens the American dream," he said.

The lack of domestic terror cells has often been cited as a major reason the US has avoided another attack on its soil since September 11, 2001.

That has often been attributed to the greater diversity of the Muslim community and its stronger integration into the American way of life, compared to Britain and Europe.

Bruce Hoffman, a former adviser on counter-terrorism to the CIA, said he believed that similar problems were merely taking longer to surface in the US because Somali immigration began in the 1980s, much later than the postcolonial immigration to Europe.

"I wonder if now we are not catching up and finding that problems which are so consuming the UK are coming here," said Mr Hoffman, who has written a forthcoming report on the issue for the SITE Intelligence Group, a private firm that monitors Islamist militant web sites.

"al-Qaeda's aim has always been to have people inside the US with US passports. Here you have a cadre of susceptible individuals and you have people ready to take advantage of that," he added.